Remembering Che in Switzerland, 50 years after his death

This content was published on October 9, 2017 11:00 AMOct 9, 2017 - 11:00

An exhibition of never-before-seen images of Ernesto Che Guevara has visited some dozen Swiss towns, as part of a celebration organised by the Swiss-Cuba Association to mark a half-century since the revolutionary’s death.

The “¡Che vive!” (“Che lives!”) exhibition features photos dating from the period following the Cuban revolution in 1959. The images have been selected from a collection of thousands that were for years conserved in the archives of the Granma newspaper, before being recently published in the work “Che: the early years. Unseen photographs 1959-1964”, by René Lechleiter and Richard Frick.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, born in 1928 in Argentina, is an emblematic figure of 20th-century history. Having developed revolutionary ideas as a medical student, he travelled to Mexico to meet the Castro brothers before taking part in the successful Cuban revolution of 1959. Following this he occupied diverse public roles in the new Cuban state, as well as travelling to Africa and elsewhere in Latin America to spread socialist ideas. He was captured and executed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967.